By 
When Stanley Kubrick set out to adapt Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, A Clockwork Orange, he hit a wall. The director had temporarily shelved the project because he simply couldn’t find an actor capable of embodying Alex DeLarge, the charismatic, Beethoven-loving delinquent who leads his “droogs” on a spree of ultra-violence.
That changed when Kubrick saw Lindsay Anderson’s If. In an interview with The Guardian, Malcolm McDowell recalls the moment his life changed: “Stanley saw If, in which I played another victim of institutionalisation. He turned to his wife and said: ‘We’ve found our Alex.’”
On meeting Kubrick, McDowell found that preparation for the role as going to be far from traditional. The actor spent the best part of a year with the legendary director before the cameras even rolled. This period was spent immersed in darkness — both literal and metaphorical.
“We spent nine months watching violent movies every day,” McDowell told The Guardian. “They were the most horrendous films: concentration camps, bodies stacked up. He was thinking of using them in the treatment sequence, where Alex is given aversion therapy.”
When it came to the film’s iconic aesthetic, the process was surprisingly improvisational. Kubrick, famous for his meticulousness, was curiously open to McDowell’s input regarding the costumes.
“One day, I asked Stanley what my friends the ‘droogs’ were going to look like. He said: ‘What have you got?’ I said: ‘The only thing in my car is my cricket bag.’ So I put my whites on. He asked what the groin protector was, and when I told him, he said: ‘Wear it on the outside!’ That became the look.”
McDowell leaned into the theatricality of the character, drawing inspiration from the greats. “In my mind, playing Alex, I always had the idea of Laurence Olivier doing Richard III,” he noted, adding that the “Nadsat” slang — a fractured adolescent dialect of Slavic and Cockney — felt “very Shakespearean.”
The brutality of the set
Filmed on a relatively modest budget of $2.2 million — Kubrick’s attempt to prove he could work small after the spiralling costs of 2001: A Space Odyssey — the shoot lasted six months. Much of the dystopian near-future Britain was captured on location, specifically at the Thamesmead estate in London.
However, small budget did not mean easy. Kubrick’s perfectionism led to moments of genuine physical and emotional distress for McDowell. In one scene where Alex is being interrogated, the actor Aubrey Morris was meant to spit on him.
“Poor old Aubrey ran out of saliva,” McDowell recalls. “Steven Berkoff, who was playing a cop, said: ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got some.’ He brought up the most hideous lurgies. Stanley asked: ‘Can you get it on his nose?’… He wanted it to dribble down just right, to be totally humiliating. Obviously, I was a bit pissed off.”
The most infamous anecdote involves the Ludovico Technique sequence, where Alex’s eyes are pinned open with lid-locks. The reality was as painful as it looked on screen. “The lid-locks kept sliding off my eyelids and scratching my cornea. When the anaesthetic wore off, I was in such pain I was banging my head against a wall. But Stanley was mainly concerned about when he would be able to get his next shot.”
Improvising “Singin’ in the Rain”
Perhaps the most chilling scene in the film — the assault on the writer and his wife — was born out of sheer boredom. After five days of struggling with the sequence and changing furniture and actresses, Kubrick asked McDowell if he could dance.
“Because I was bored stiff, I jumped and went straight into the ad lib of Singin’ in the Rain, and on the beats whacking her and kicking the writer. Stanley was laughing so hard that tears were coming down his cheeks. We drove straight back to his house, where he called someone and bought the rights to use the song.”
Upon its release in late 1971 in the United States and early 1972 in the UK, the film became a cultural lightning rod. It was met with polarised reviews and accusations that it inspired real-world copycat violence. The pressure became so great that, following death threats to his family, Kubrick requested Warner Bros. withdraw the film from British cinemas — a ban that lasted until his death in 1999.
McDowell feels the film’s power hasn’t faded, though the nature of its impact has shifted. While the physical violence might seem “old hat” by modern standards, the “psychological violence” remains potent.
Reflecting on the film’s endurance and its induction into the National Film Registry, McDowell told The Guardian: “Doing this film has put me in movie history… That debate, about a man’s freedom of choice, is still current.”
Discover more behind the scenes stories on Top 10 Films
Buried Alive And Set On Fire: How John Carpenter Risked Everything For Realism
Kurt Russell finds himself in trouble when a shape-shifting alien starts causing havoc in John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing.
From burying actors alive to accidental fireballs, discover how John Carpenter used “no-nonsense” practical effects to create cinema’s most terrifying icons.
Comments